I am impressed by this ui. Awesome! Height zoning and setbacks builtin in an intuitive manner! Woo!

Is the setback going to be the only thing specifying that parking is required, or will businesses spontaneously generate their own optional parking lots even if no setback was specified of land values allow?

That's so awesome and well done! It gives a lot of freedom and some potential to some really cool options. I could imagine having an area where the stores are pulled back far from the road with a little park or walking area in front or the height thing coming into play when planning airports. It'd be cool if you could alter both of those along a zone, but I'm sure that'll come in a future update.

It'd be really loving cool if you could alter the setback space after buildings were already in without loving up the buildings. One that that always SUPER annoyed me in city sims was that changing anything meant losing all your old buildings. There was no sense of permanence/history.

Like it'd be sweet if you could add a lane to the road, add parking, add a park, sidewalks, etc. Move the road in and put a park in the middle of the lanes, or a railway in the middle, all that kind of stuff. As long as it wasn't so wide that it hit the building, the buildings would stay and "adjust" to the new setback space. I would love you forever.

I'll admit, I thought my enthusiasm for this project would die down as I scratched my city sim itch with Cities: Skylines, but these development videos continue to impress me.

I thought the same, but this latest video has me more excited about Citybound than any of the previous ones. I think it's because Skylines does traffic and roads relatively well (certainly in a very pretty way), so the roads in Citybound don't hold as much excitement for me as they used to. But when citybound touches on anything else, it looks amazing. That zone control is absolutely superb. I look forward to videos about the economy.

Anselm: maybe it's just me, but the bright pastel green background makes it really difficult to see anything in your videos, especially planned roads. Any chance of darkening it?

It'd be really loving cool if you could alter the setback space after buildings were already in without loving up the buildings. One that that always SUPER annoyed me in city sims was that changing anything meant losing all your old buildings. There was no sense of permanence/history.

Like it'd be sweet if you could add a lane to the road, add parking, add a park, sidewalks, etc. Move the road in and put a park in the middle of the lanes, or a railway in the middle, all that kind of stuff. As long as it wasn't so wide that it hit the building, the buildings would stay and "adjust" to the new setback space. I would love you forever.

I imagine that's largely the point of the setback, for widening roads, but odd that Anselm didn't mention it.

One suggestion: You should be able to drag the height restriction down to the ground (0 stories) to say "I don't care - make the Burj Khalifa." Otherwise, you'll be scrolling for a long time to get huge skyscrapers.

Edit: I wonder if there's an elegant way to implement a sky exposure plane without making it over-complicated to use. Then we could have stuff like this be dynamically created, rather than random.

I missed the last update, so let me just say . Not gonna lie, I got a huge loving UI boner watching that. I literally snorted incredulously watching the zones adapt on the fly while you were dragging roads around, and all of the zone painting/config stuff looks phenomenal. poo poo, however Citybound itself works out, I'm just glad you're doing this work and that other people/companies are smart enough to steal it from you for future generations of citybuilders.

Obviously I hope Citybound works out fantastically and you earn piles of money, but seriously, at least at first glance this looks like the kind of genre-defining advancement that citybuilders have been in need of for decades. Skylines has made some important advances, especially with roads and agents, but they're still stuck in a zoning paradigm that's straight out of SimCity 2000.

Great to see an update! As I have been traveling around the absolute disaster of urban planning that is Kiev I was thinking of this game and all the very different sort of cities we can hopefully make.

\/ Yeah those barely even really count as cities. So many american "cities" are just a huge mess of roads and highways dotted with houses and strip malls and a core of office towers but no where does a real city form. A city in the form of gas, no substance, expanding to fill all available space.

The core of Kiev is ok (although way too many huge over-wide soviet style roads that would probably perform better after a road diet) but outside of the city centre is just an endless sprawl of awful apartment blocks along jammed highways and stroads. It's an extremely car-centric city that's only getting worse since their urban planning theory hasn't adapted since soviet times and development is "planned" based enitrely on corruption/political connections so you get massive 20 story apartment towers in the middle of a farm field because the land-owner knows someone in the local authority and got their project approved. The infastructure is horrible, the driving culture is really bad (those slavic dash cam vids are an accurate depiction of daily driving), and it leads to massive commute times and traffic jams.

Baronjutter fucked around with this message at Sep 28, 2015 around 08:49

Name ten American cities in the south. Oh wait you can't because we've all merged into one souless expanse of swamp and subdivisions broken up by strip malls and Dollar General's.

(I do like Dollar General though, they always have canning supplies)

Excuse me? The official Houston city limits contain only 600 square miles (not counting water), a mere ten times as much area as Washington, DC. It's metropolitan area is only 10,000 square miles, barely more land than the entire state of Maryland—it's not even as big as West Virginia. Stop exaggerating. If you want a terrible city that's eating half an entire state, you're thinking of Southern California.

Excuse me? The official Houston city limits contain only 600 square miles (not counting water), a mere ten times as much area as Washington, DC. It's metropolitan area is only 10,000 square miles, barely more land than the entire state of Maryland—it's not even as big as West Virginia. Stop exaggerating. If you want a terrible city that's eating half an entire state, you're thinking of Southern California.

Well, north Texas continues the trend really. Edmonton has a 3700 sq mile metro and is actually slightly less dense than even Houston.

By slightly less you mean half the density right?

I was going to mention how St. John's, NL is an utter failure of a city due to a pathological fear of density: Terrible parking availability, a large sprawl of copy pasted suburbs, a decaying urban core, and terrible public transporation. It's comparable to Houston's density, but with about 200k people...

Then I checked the 'Edmonton Capital Region' after your post and felt really sad for you. Oh well, at least you have a city that's less cruddy at the center of that Metro.

I was going to mention how St. John's, NL is an utter failure of a city due to a pathological fear of density: Terrible parking availability, a large sprawl of copy pasted suburbs, a decaying urban core, and terrible public transporation. It's comparable to Houston's density, but with about 200k people...

Then I checked the 'Edmonton Capital Region' after your post and felt really sad for you. Oh well, at least you have a city that's less cruddy at the center of that Metro.

A fair bit of it comes from the city of Edmonton itself pulling rear end covers for places like Sherwood Park.

SP: "Hey, we wanna not pay taxes! Wah."
E: "Fine, here's a deal, we'll asspull some numbers to claim large swaths of your population and let you stay a Hamlet."
SP: "Really? Deal!"

I'm curious... other developers would be terrified to open source any part of their work, for fear of losing their primary means of making money and paying the bills. Are you confident that the core, non-open source engine going to be sufficient for you to make a living off the game?

Thinking of Tarn Adams here, and his aversion to open source. But then again, he's not a fan of collaborations at all, while you clearly are.